Table of contents
Mastering Pastoral Care
These books, originally published by Leadership Journal, offer deep dives on pressing issues of ministry and leadership from veteran ministry experts like Eugene Peterson, Fred Smith, Marshall Shelley, and others.
- Introduction
- 1 Home Visitation in an Age of Teleconferencing
- 2 Letting the Laity Pastor
- 3 Worship as Pastoral Care
- 4 Ministering in the Marketplace
- 5 Caring for Key Leaders
- 6 Strategies for Ministering to Inactives
- 7 Nurturing the Revitalized
- 8 The Art of Pastoral Listening
- 9 Risking Lay Ministry
- 10 Using the Disciplines to Care
- 11 Helping People Care for One Another
- 12 Balancing Service and Solace
In our fax-paced age, when personal contact is often replaced by the technological touch, it is not easy to care personally for parishioners. You see many members only on Sunday morning. Those who are inactive you see approximately two times a year. Because families are so busy, you may be discouraged about finding your members at home. And if you’re buried under administrative details, pastoral care seems like a luxury of a small rural nineteenth-century ministry.
In spite of obstacles, however, you entered the ministry—and remain in it—because you long to care for others. You willingly assume the varied duties of the modern pastorate, but pastoral care is what you want to provide. How to do it with today’s busy members, under the constraints of modern church life, is the subject of this fifth volume in the Mastering Ministry series.
Bruce Larson, Paul Anderson, and Doug Self remain committed to pastoral ministry and are known for offering fresh models of pastoral care. Their insights arise out of the daily challenges of pastoral life.
You are called to be many things these days: a preacher, a manager, a counselor, and a teacher, to name a few. But your congregation still calls you “pastor,” and you happily accept the title. Mastering Pastoral Care will help you live up to it.
